The Most Egregious War Criminals Of All Time

Mladic earned the nickname the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his part in authorizing a record-breaking siege and the largest mass murder since World War II. He is currently on trial for genocide.

In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina separated and declared their independence from Yugoslavia. The Serbs, however, wanted to create a new Serbian state that would include land that the two countries claimed. Under Mladic’s command, Serbian forces surrounded the capital city of Sarajevo and laid waste to it with amounts of artillery that the newly independent countries could not match.

According to census records, Sarajevo had a population of 525,980 before the siege. By the end of the four-year conflict, almost 100,000 of those people were gone. About 12,000 people were killed — including more than 1,000 children — and more than 50,000 people were injured. Serbian forces used snipers, mass killings, and hundreds of missile attacks a day to try and break the city.

In July of 1995, Mladic oversaw the Srebrenica Massacre. During the massacre, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Thousands of others were held in deplorable POW camps, raped and tortured — often in front of peacekeeping soldiers, who many times did nothing to stop it.